This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every fall, monarch butterflies fuel up on nectar from Iowa's fall-blooming wildflowers before embarking on an extraordinary migration from North America to Mexico. But the pathways they take and how their travel is affected by weather and other factors have largely remained a mystery.
Now, researchers are using advances in wildlife tracking technology to fill those gaps. A team of conservation scientists and ecology experts at Iowa State is using BlūMorpho tags, the lightest tracking devices available, to monitor 100 monarchs they've raised, or reared, over the summer. Throughout September, the team released the butterflies from campus to join millions of other eastern North American monarchs on their journey south.
"The availability of small radio tags is a game changer," said John Pleasants, emeritus adjunct associate professor in Iowa State's department of ecology, evolution and organismal biology. "Previous tagging with small decals attached to the wings could only tell us if a butterfly made it to Mexico; it could not tell us the pathway it took. With these new tags, we can see its entire journey and how weather affects it along the way." The new tags take battery-life challenges out of the equation and instead offer near-real-time location data using Bluetooth technology that connects cellphones, tablets and computers in their area.
Katherine Kral-O'Brien and Mykayla Hagaman, who oversee the Iowa Monarch Conservation Consortium based at Iowa State, and Nathan Brockman, director of entomology at Reiman Gardens, teamed up over the summer to collect and raise monarch eggs and caterpillars under three separate conditions: entirely indoors, entirely outdoors and indoors only during the final larval stages. They'll compare flight data from 75 reared monarchs with 25 wild-caught monarchs to see whether rearing conditions affect survival or the butterflies' ability to travel in the correct southwest direction during the roughly eight-week migration. "There's been a lot of debate around the best ways to help monarchs thrive.
Should you bring them inside and rear them? And does that help or hurt them?" Kral-O'Brien said. "We're excited to answer those questions." The study is part of a larger project with researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who say collaboration across multiple locations is necessary to better understand and protect the population.
The eastern North American monarch population, which ranges east of the Rocky Mountains into Canada and across the eastern United States, has declined by as much as 80%. Many of the monarchs that reach the overwintering grounds in a small cluster of forests in central Mexico originate in the Midwest, making Iowa an important region for monarch production in North America, according to Pleasants, who connected the Iowa State team with the project in Canada. "What we do here, as far as modifying landscapes to support monarch conservation, can have a big effect," he said.
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